Many call centers handle a large volume of inquiries, usually by phone, for sales, information, customer support and other services. Typical call centers provide the ability to route multiple incoming, customer-initiated calls to agents which provide sales, information, or support on behalf of an entity interested in establishing or maintaining a relationship with the customer. An Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) is utilized to selectively route the incoming calls. An ACD generally refers to a device that receives incoming voice calls, answers with a taped announcement, holds the calls with background music or a message, then automatically assigns the call on a first come first serve basis to the next available agent.
Modern call center systems selectively route incoming calls based on a number of factors such as the number called or dialed, the originating number, the queued sequence of the caller, the geographic location of the caller, accumulated caller history, and other relevant criteria. Once the system has evaluated the inbound caller's information, if any, the system searches for an available agent to service the call. Availability of agents may be dependent on any number of factors such as a skill level or a schedule of the agent. The number of agents within the contact center and available to the system may often be limited by the physical space available for the agents to operate. Contact centers have to deal with a limited number of agents to handle a large number of incoming customer calls.
Furthermore, many call centers provide services to multiple countries, if not worldwide. This may result in a need for call centers to be able to provide their services in multiple languages with consistency. Even in the US, it has become common practice for call centers to provide assistance in at least three or four languages (e.g. Spanish, Chinese, Korean) in addition to English. Establishing separate call centers for each language or directing calls from a single center to different language-based centers may prove challenging for entities that provide services such as sales, support, and the like.
Some at home agents may not have either a computer or high speed internet access. They are only guaranteed to have a telephone. This means that the traditional high speed internet, PC, VPN & IP phone approaches cannot support these interpreters.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.